The new Senate GOP Whip argued in an op-ed this morning that a partial government shutdown may be the best thing to get the country’s fiscal house in order.

Like all lawmakers who voted for the New Year’s fiscal cliff deal, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) called the bill imperfect but necessary in the immediate term to avoid tax hikes from the expiration of the Bush tax cuts.

“Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the fiscal cliff ordeal was that President Obama engaged in the same type of brinksmanship that has become his hallmark. For the fourth time in two years, he stalled and delayed on critical fiscal policy actions,” Cornyn wrote in the Houston Chronicle.

Noting the pattern of 11th-hour legislative crises from the 2011 government shutdown threat to the 2012 debt ceiling crisis, Cornyn said “in every instance, the White House has purposefully slow-walked the process in a shameless attempt to score cheap political points.”

“Over the next few months, we will reach deadlines related to the debt ceiling, the sequester and the continuing appropriations resolution that has funded federal operations since October. If history is any guide, President Obama won’t see fit to engage congressional Republicans until the 11th hour. In fact, he has already signaled an unwillingness to negotiate over the debt ceiling. This is unacceptable,” Cornyn wrote.

“The coming deadlines will be the next flashpoints in our ongoing fight to bring fiscal sanity to Washington. It may be necessary to partially shut down the government in order to secure the long-term fiscal well being of our country, rather than plod along the path of Greece, Italy and Spain. President Obama needs to take note of this reality and put forward a plan to avoid it immediately.”

Bridget Johnson is a veteran journalist whose news articles and opinion columns have run in dozens of news outlets across the globe. Bridget first came to Washington to be online editor at The Hill, where she wrote The World from The Hill column on foreign policy. Previously she was an opinion writer and editorial board member at the Rocky Mountain News and nation/world news columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News.
She is an NPR contributor and has contributed to USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, Politico and more, and has myriad television and radio credits as a commentator. Bridget is Washington Editor for PJ Media.

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1.
captain obvious

I’m sure that Pravda will report a partial government shut-down objectively, but Mr. Cornyn and his fellow Senate comedians are much smarter than us idiots who read blogs and stuff so he shouldn’t pay any attention to that.

Maybe Cornyn and others should consider using their own private soap boxes to forcefully and consistently state what is actually happening in the country and to describe what the tyrant are doing to the country. Maybe they could start by refuting Obama’s chuckler about cutting the budget by a trillion and talking about his “tax cuts”.

But I guess they figure they are performing so splendidly as opposition leaders that resorting to telling the country the truth isn’t necessary.

Comrade Obama doesn’t need waking up; he’s wide awake and playing those stupid old men like a cheap fiddle. I sometimes feel like I’m the only Republican officeholder who has ever dealt with real lefties. And I don’t mean the squishy limousine liberal and faculty lounge lefty, I mean the Alinsky disciple trained and disciplined lefty who knows s/he is a lefty – like Comrade Obama and his minions.

You don’t negotiate with real lefties; you impose your will on them or they on you or you settle for a wary stasis. If you get them to a bargain, even a written bargain, they won’t keep it past the moment you take the gun away from their head. There is no such thing as dealing with them in good faith, because they don’t believe they have any obligation to deal with you in good faith. You can’t take them at their word because the whole notion of giving their word is foreign to them. If they promise you something it is only because you have demonstrated the power to extract that promise from them and the promise is only good for so long as you continue to demonstrate that power. If you get them to give you something, they do so only because they concluded they had to and will never rest until they get it back.

I really don’t know how the Republicans can win this. I know I’m better at this than any of them have demonstrated themselves to be and I don’t know with any confidence how I would win this. The only power the Republicans have is the HoR’s power to refuse to enact a CR and/or raise the debt ceiling. I don’t think Comrade Obama cares; his objective isn’t to run the Country effectively, it is to eliminate the US as a major power able to act unilaterally and along the way steal some money for his co-conspirators. If the House Republicans shut down the government Comrade Obama will milk it for all it is worth. If the government shuts down at 8AM, there’ll be dying grannies and starving babies on every TV screen in the Country before 8:30. All it takes is a complicit Democrat mayor and he can have rioting in any doughnut city. All it takes is a stupid Republican governor to give Comrade Obama the opportunity to “suppress the rebellion” with federal resources. A permutation of that is a stupid Republican governor who steps in with state resources to restore order and a plaintive wail from the mayor for federal help to restrain the evil racist forces attacking his city. A government shutdown gives all the opportunity in the World for the left to make it look like the Country is in violent chaos, and in some places to make it actually in violent chaos. Comrade Obama’s junta ain’t likely to let an opportunity like that go to waste.

If it were just the public employee union playbook of the “virtual strike” that they do so well, the right answer is to just do it and stay the course in the face of all the bleating and wailing because people will soon realize that while the TV is telling them that grannies are dying and babies are starving, they don’t see any of it themselves. What happened with the Gingrich Shutdown was they caved to the media pressure from the virtual shutdown before there was any public realization that the government had shut down and nothing changed.

The two unknowns and uncontrollables are the fact that we’re an even dumber and brainwashed Country now than we were then, so the realization may not come and, more seriously, unlike Clinton, Obama may let slip the dogs to cause real violence and chaos. The only way to find out is to do it, else you have to give Comrade Obama what he wants. One way leads to slavery and the other to war, and maybe slavery but later. We are living in interesting times.

The press is now a co-conspirator of the leftists, so it is nearly impossible for the public to hear the truth. And not many appear to be interested in what is happening anyway.

I understand why the ruling class republicans do what they do. They are essentially junior partners of the leftists. Even so, it’s difficult to understand why fewer than 1% of the politicians in this country stand up and describe what is actually happening. As long as there is only a few isolated Alan Wests, those few will inevitably we shouted down and discredited. If there were 50, then the press couldn’t hide them all and there would be some chance to shine a light on the destruction of a great nation.

Talk radio appears to have reached it’s limit. At this point, it preaches to the already converted and no new converts are happening. Fox’s impact is similarly dulled and it is probably in the process of capitulating anyway.

If a secession movement doesn’t get started, seriously, soon, then there is probably going to be a catastrophe in the very near future that dwarfs 2008, and that will be followed by violence. Maybe that is not only inevitable, but the only way to get out of the death spiral.

The Junta is NEVER going to let a state secede. All the lefties in their arrogance will start out with their usual tripe about tax transfers to Red states and how we’re all bitter, clinging untermenchen, and say good riddance, then they’ll figure out that they need food and natural resources just like The North first said “let our erring sisters go” and then figured out what loss of Customs revenue collected in The South would do to the federal treasury and what a free trade Port of New Orleans would do to the west to east trade they’d been trying so hard to develop.

What I’d like to see is some Republican governors re-discover state sovereignty and also to start holding Democrat front groups in their state to account. Most federal funding to the states really only launders money from the Treasury to Democrat front groups. Republican states should really assess whether they need that money and if they do accept it, they should just audit Hell out of the grantees and contractors as well as the sinecures in their government that administer the money. State and federal worker-bees don’t want to go to jail in furtherance of the Junta’s agendae, so it is a weakness of the federal government and federally financed money laundries worth exploiting.

Of course they won’t “let” red states secede. Who will pay for California, Detroit, and the rest of America’s Greece’s if that happens.

But in the unlikely case states conclude that the increasingly ugly marriage can’t be saved, there is even less chance of another civil war.

Officially, at least, leftists would have to be delighted to get rid of the bitter clingers who don’t know how to run a real country or appreciate the wisdom of aborting unwanted children. They wouldn’t have to prop up the rubes any longer with their enlightened policies.

Plus, the government will interpret the shut down in the most destructive ways: If you need any sort of government approval, instead of assuming means the government waives opposition to your actions, they will assume you must simply wait.

What we need first is a law that assigns the citizenry rights to carry on in the absence of government: If a shutdown of government closes an agency that would normally require some bureaucratic process before a citizen can perform some function, the government is deemed to have waived its requirements.

Shut down closed the office that issues fishing licenses? Fine. Unless some do-gooder wants to come in on unpaid time, the government waives its requirement to obtain a fishing license before fishing. If someone has a real problem with that, they can always fund the continued operations of the office on their own.

Fortunately, the federal government doesn’t do much on an ongoing basis that directly effects most people. I don’t think he’d dare shut down air traffic controls or border crossing points, but who knows with this guy. We could certainly live a long while without the FBI, DHS, even TSA; frankly I’m more afraid of TSA than terrorists. I can live without National Parks and such for a very long time. Indians can go awhile without their federal beads and blankets. Most social welfare programs that are federally funded go first to the states, so it would be a long time before granny couldn’t get her Medicare or Susie the babymomma couldn’t get her EBT to work. If he really wanted to cause an upset, he could just refuse to issue SS checks, military payrolls, etc. Actually, I’m sure there is a default totally automated system for payrolls and SS, but a lie’s good as the truth, usually better. I know our strike planning scenarios contemplated paying all our bills with just a handful of supervisors and managers if necessary. But all that said, the Junta and their media friends would make it look like the end of the World.